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After Miriam Makeba left South Africa in 1959 to promote the anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, her mother died in 1960. When she tried to fly home for the funeral, she learned that her South African passport had been cancelled.
In 1968 Makeba married Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power activist. Soon afterward, American concert bookings and recording deals were cancelled even though her music had not changed. The couple moved to Guinea, which shows how a performer's commercial viability can depend on whom the audience associates her with rather than on what she produces.
Makeba insisted that she did not sing politics; she sang about her life and her people. Where a regime depends on hiding ordinary conditions, a plain description of daily reality works as dissent. The state, not the artist, decides that truth-telling is political.
Makeba sang songs like the Xhosa 'Click Song' (Qongqothwane) in her own languages for audiences that could not understand the words, and she kept doing it abroad. For an exile who has lost citizenship, language and melody become the part of home that no government can confiscate. Performing that material also makes a foreign audience recognize a people it would otherwise overlook.